Best Practices for Artifact Management and Version Control in DevOps Pipelines

Artifact management may be the most important feature of a pipeline. At the most basic level, a pipeline creates binaries/packages from source code and deploys them to appropriate infrastructure, powering the applications being deployed.

All files that make up an application should be managed using source control.

Unfortunately, many organizations fail to follow this rule. Traditionally developers only use a version‑control system for source code, ignoring other supporting files such as install scripts, configuration files, or test data.

Everything that participates in the application lifecycle should be checked into source control, including but not limited to:

Source code

Build scripts

Pipeline definition files

Configuration files

Tests and test data

Database schema

Database migration scripts

Infrastructure definition scripts

Cleanup/installation/teardown scripts

Other related files

The ultimate goal is that anyone can inspect everything related to the application and recreate it locally or in any alternative environment.

A common anti‑pattern is using special deployment scripts that exist only on a particular machine or a specific team member’s workstation, or attachments in wiki pages, etc.

Version control also means all these resources are reviewed and have a detailed history of changes. If you want to see what the application looked like six months ago, you can easily use VCS tools to retrieve that information.

Note that even though all these resources should be version controlled, they do not have to reside in the same repository. Whether you use multiple repositories or a single one is a decision that requires careful consideration and has no definitive answer; the important part is to ensure everything is truly version controlled.

Although GitOps is an emerging practice for promotion and deployment using Git operations, you should not adopt this best practice solely because you use GitOps. Regardless of the software paradigm you follow, having historical and audit information for project assets is always beneficial.

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